Festival Dispatch: Karen Russell and Junot Díaz

A pair of genii were spotted last night, on Twenty-third Street, talking about ecological destruction and the languages of Middle Earth. Junot Díaz, a 2012 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, and Karen Russell, one of this year’s recipients, were on hand for a talk moderated by New Yorker senior editor Willing Davidson. Both authors seemed semi-skeptical of the endeavor at hand, which was discussing their work as award-winning writers. “Writing is crazy, spending all day taking dictation from imaginary people,” Russell said. “Writers talking about their books is like parents talking about their kids,” Díaz said, leaning casually on a stool, looking like your favorite young English professor, which he is, at M.I.T. Díaz meant that he’d prefer to listen to people talk about almost anything else, and Davidson apologized for the fact that, without any kids to extol, they would have to stick to their work.

Díaz may not like talking about kids, but both he and Russell extolled the virtues of children as characters and narrators more capable of addressing some of the world’s most pernicious topics—racism, sexism, violence—than jaded, calculating adults. As if to prove the point, one audience member asked Díaz and Russell if there were any suppressed emotions they felt too vulnerable to put on the page. Both demurred, quite understandably, with Russell noting that the stage’s “Guantánamo lighting” did not make her feel any more comfortable about revealing her innermost fears and concerns.

It was for similar reasons that both writers said they prefer the worlds of genre and fantasy to realism: nobody enjoys examining the worst parts of the world they occupy, but might be more willing to do so when elves or werewolves are involved. In Russell’s novel “Swamplandia!” a girl follows her sister on a journey to the underworld, where the latter has gone with her lover, who happens to be a ghost. Díaz is currently turning a short story set sometime in the future, featuring a fearsome, amorphous plague—first published last year in the New Yorker’s Science Fiction issue—into a novel. It was easier, they felt, in such settings, to address issues that adult humans often prefer to keep subdued. Both expressed admiration for Dune and Lord of the Rings. “Once you activate a reader’s generosity, they will hang through all kinds of elvish nonsense,” Díaz said, comparing the dabs of Spanish that punctuate his prose with J. R. R. Tolkein’s remorseless deployment of made-up languages. “Who the fuck can read Quenya?”

The conversation moved to the end by discussing why so many of the fantasy worlds authors create tend toward the dystopic. Where are the utopias? Russell said, more or less, that utopia wasn’t much fun to narrate: what conflicts are there in Eden? Díaz was more specific about what his utopia would and would not involve: at a basic level, utopia would be an end to white cultural, political, and social supremacy. Culturally, he said he was shocked, in 2013, to see how prevalent whiteness was everywhere he looked. “This country is more diverse than it’s ever been, yet the addiction to whiteness is more pernicious than ever,” Díaz said. “It’s like America has an addiction to whiteness; if we don’t get our five doses of whiteness a day we’ll die.”